You Had No Taste Before AI

If you have high standards, its regurgitating info in an ill disciplined fashion. Because its input isn't really of the highest standard upon which the model is trained on.

Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made.

Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesn’t mean everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.

Speak for yourself, not everyone works for the paycheck.

However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!

This is a mixup that the author of the article makes as well:

>Copying and pasting code without understanding it.

>Sending resumes and emails that aren’t proofread and edited.

>Asking others to review code without giving it a self review.

>Noticing a quality issue and failing to document or fix it.

These are not issues of taste.

Should an entity strive to be profitable? of course. How else will it be self sustaining?

The problem arises when entities maximize for profit with no non-financial values that underpin their decision making.

This needs some justification. Profits are what you get when you can do something for less than you charge for it, and be competitive. To not be good enough to make profit you need to be able to force money out of people e.g. with taxes.

Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade is undelivered.

The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically. Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.

And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to help someone out by giving them something for free?

Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.

It’s very easy for us to tell people to just not do that stuff, but I can tell you from my podcast production days that these annoying trends are often the difference between a 20% rise and a 20% drop in audience. No different than a clever book title turning heads.

To be clear, I find most of these trends incredibly obnoxious and I hated indulging them.

And I think that is not all that surprising, because much of what it was trained on was corporate-speak, which has the same problem.

We can also talk about taste in articles, which seems to have degenerated to "any pro-AI article will be voted up and defended".

do these people detect all AI? Of course not, they detect crap.

Or is it only bad when "AI people" do it?

Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).

There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .

Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.

I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.

Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)

1. Attention is finite. You can't be tasteful in everything you do. If I dedicate my attention to making tasteful home design, I just don't have the attention to take tasteful photos, and it makes sense that instead I'll just look at photos that someone else prepared. In this scenario, I'm very tasteful in home design, I'm completely tasteless in photography. And that's great. Because the alternative is to be mediocre in everything.

2. It just makes sense that for any given problem, the society would dedicate a small group of individuals to find a tasteful solution, and then apply said solution across the whole population. Most tasteful people are far deep into the territory of diminishing returns, and the attitude of everyone being tasteful simply won't work at the scale of entire society. This means that it's an expectation that most people would be tasteless in most situations, and just follow tasteful people's suggestions - after all, are you going to argue against your doctor, or are you going to just take the prescribed pills, even if theoretically you could improve your treatment by 2%?

> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."

That's exactly the most common scenario. Blindly following latest trends will usually result in others perceiving you positively.

Those are things that AIs can check by themselves.

What AIs are lacking is common sense.

They have no problem to inline everything they do which makes the codebase unmaintainable for humans

If you tell them to refactor, you get useless abstractions, like functions that get called in random places with no sense of structure.

That's because I trust the code that I write to have quality, because I wrote it, which means I understand it. I may choose not to test something because I am certain that nothing can go wrong with it.

When your repository is thousands of lines of code written by an AI with tendencies to forget critical components, duplicate work, make bonkers editing errors that shuffles everything around to all the wrong places, and invent packages out of thin air, you need a system of accountability.

I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that'd accept a PR which introduced untested & undocumented features, in which the code doesn't even pass the company's internal linter.

Those feel like very low bars for your colleagues & clients to set.

If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants.

So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.

And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste".

Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful".

Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.

It's all peer pressure, all social status.

The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments.

On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it.

Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)

(and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud)

I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing.

Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity.

Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air.

Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly.

To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.

Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of fashion.

I mean another way to think about it is - eating artificially produced food.

What happens when you consume it? Your taste for good stuff is eroded away - somehow, the artificial crap is acceptable. Most notably because of its lower price.

The same phenonomon with food, will prevail with information.

Its not as subjective.

People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...

No. I think you're wrong.

'Vibe coding' (a phrase I hate) introduced me to so many different software packages that I didn't even knew existed. Now, with no LLM subscription, I still use many of the software packages that I discovered via LLMs in my own work.

Like any other media, whether or not you use it as a springboard for learning is up to you. Literally every other store of knowledge had critics like you with that same exact opinion (boob-tube, brain-drain, couch-potatos, book-worms) -- and every single one of those forms of media ended up tremendously useful for us.

When you watch YouTube you don't have to go watch the most popular asinine shorts; you could use it to learn a language or perhaps some history or a math lesson.

Is it bad because a lazy person can be tempted into skipping the work and making the LLM do it? That's because a lazy person is involved -- not because the technology 'is a mind virus'.

P.S. 'mind virus' is the stupidest nu-speak crap term I have heard in years. In fact the whole "I don't like the thing so i'm going to give it a scary name" concept has become so tired in recent years that I have a hard time keeping up with the new dictionary -- is this what getting old is like in every era or is this special?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

Don't go blaming Dawkins, no one said that shit until recently. As with much crap nu-speak it looks like Musk was the one that set it off. Figures.